


Waiting

by greenapples



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Merlin/Arthur (implied to a point), Merlin/Buckets of angst (ye be warned)., Merlin/Gwaine (also implied to a point), Merlin/Gwen (mostly), Merlin/Loneliness (prevalently), Merlin/Morgana (heavily)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 20:32:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1085399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenapples/pseuds/greenapples
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘You’re testing me?’, she lets go of his hand, resettles herself in her seat and reaches for a pack of tarot cards. Merlin is silently shocked that there’s no crystal ball in the vicinity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waiting

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: unexplained affinity for mechanics. I feel you should be warned about this because it was basically pulled out of thin air. It makes sense, if you ask me, but it's not necessarily based in anything canon's ever told us. While we're at it, I would also like to warn for any lack of canon-compliance due to my laxity in watching the last few eps. Any other lack of canon-compliance is absolutely intentional because I really prefer my version of events. Listen, they deserve their happy ending, okay? 
> 
> A/N: for F, because she's such a good fella and I heart her so.

‘A fortuneteller’, he says.

 

She breathes in. She breathes out. She grips Merlin’s hand a little harder, her short, red-lacquered nails digging into the sides of his skin. She breathes in and doesn’t dignify him with an answer this time.

 

‘I see pain in your future’, Morgana tells him, her voice is softer than usual (before?) and the part of him that’s been cataloging her for differences and similarities, finds it refreshing. Though it is always hard to tell with her. It’s been a while since he last found her.

 

‘Oh?’, he says when the silence finally sinks in.

 

Morgana, or rather, Alexa, as she’s called now, looks at him in what Merlin interprets as a mental eye-roll. ‘Yes. Lots and lots of pain. Of the self-inflicted kind’.

 

Now, Merlin’s been around a lifetime or a hundred, he’s perfectly able to tell when he’s being played, but this is Morgana and this is Merlin (Martin, as he’s calling himself these days) and well, it is how their story goes, isn’t it?

 

So he says, ‘what about my past?’, and she looks at him like suddenly he’s surprised her, like suddenly he’s worth her time.

 

‘You’re testing me?’, she lets go of his hand, resettles herself in her seat and reaches for a pack of tarot cards. Merlin is silently shocked that there’s no crystal ball in the vicinity.

 

‘Maybe’, he says and clenches his fist in hope and preemptive disappointment.

 

‘Hmm’, is all he hears her say for a while.

 

Morgana shuffles and re-shuffles the cards, makes little mountains with them and Merlin’s nerves, spreads them in circles and shuffles those circles. Merlin’s heartbeat has lodged itself in his throat. His stomach tightens.

 

She stops.

 

She looks at him.

 

She becomes wary and slits her eyes and tilts her head slightly, looks him right in the eye and…

 

‘Who are you?’

 

Merlin’s stomach drops as his heart rattles inside his ribcage. He’s dizzy.

 

‘Why?, he asks in a hoarse whisper, in which he can hear his hope shatter and his longing stripped bare.

 

‘It’s just- ‘. She holds her breath for a moment, taps a finger against the mess of face-down cards on the table. ‘I don’t understand this’.

 

He says nothing. She says nothing.

 

They look at each other. Her eyes are green again, her skin a shade darker, her hair blond. Her smile nowhere to be found.

 

So he reaches out, picks up a card and starts telling her about  _her_  past.

 

It’s not until he levitates The Priestess, The Tower and The Moon round each other, that she stumbles backwards and shouts for him to get the fuck out of her house and who the fuck is he and what the fuck is he doing.

 

All in all, Merlin thinks this could have gone worse. Somehow.

 

 

-

 

  
  
After Queen Guinevere Pendragon of Camelot passed away, Merlin wandered the land. Fixed little magic leaks, spread greenery over rocks, made the place look as though she’d walked through it scattering her very own essence.

 

Many flowers blossomed entirely too early that spring, some were still bright and lovely late into summer.

 

Merlin was unrepentant.

 

He never saw Leon again. The sight of his tall shape dwarfing the doorway, firelight flickering in the room behind him was the last memory Merlin carried with him of his old friend.

 

‘ _The oldest of them all_ ’ they used to joke, before it became too true and too painful.

 

He traveled. Tried to separate his own magic from his body, tried to make himself someone who could die alongside his life, tried to curse the skies and call for dragons that would not come, tried to make himself a part of Albion (a part of Gwen and Arthur and everybody else). Ultimately, he went back to Ealdor hoping to become some old, bitter hermit no one would bother, and be left alone with his sadness.

 

Of course, because he was still Merlin back then, and his life, sorrowful lover of a dead Queen or not, had always followed a certain pattern, he wound up becoming the village’s sort-of-witchdoctor-of-whom-we-don’t-speak-about-in-polite-company and the children’s plaything.

 

He’s pretty sure this is when his soul started to heal.

 

 

  
–  
  


 

 

‘I told you who I am’, he says, voice as calm and even as he can make it. That exploded light-bulb was  _not_  his work, he’s sure of it. If only he could make  _Morgana_  see that too.

 

Though that may carry it’s own set of dangers, coming to think of it.

 

‘Bullshit. I’m calling the police’.

 

Merlin has had the police called on him before, so he’s not too preoccupied by this, it’s the way Morgana’s skin has gone ashen that’s beginning to worry him.

 

‘Maybe you should sit down’.

 

‘Maybe you should fuck off’.

 

She does sit down, though.

 

‘Look, I know it’s a lot to take in’, he starts as she clutches the phone in one hand and a packet of cigarettes in the other, obviously trying to decide which is more advisable in the present situation. ‘And you don’t have to believe me, I’m just trying to explain what you didn’t understand before.’

 

The way she drops the phone and arches her eyebrow tells him he’s made some kind of mistake. But at least she’s dropped the phone.

 

‘Oh? Is it immortality or insanity that allows you to read minds, then?’

 

He’s still befuddled when she blows the first puff of smoke directly at his face, even though he’s cornered himself all the way across the room.

 

‘Huh?’

 

‘Obviously it’s not wisdom’, this time she does roll her eyes at him. ‘I never said what it was I didn’t understand. So how can you explain it to me, oh grand wizard of olde’

 

He’s saved the fucking  _world_  and all he gets in return is sass. All the blooming time. Maybe he should look into the possibility of Arthur being her brother in this life too. Maybe Gwen, even. Honestly.

 

‘That’s not what I said- ‘

 

‘It’s totally what you implied, you fu- ‘

 

‘If you would let me expla- ‘

 

‘What do you thin- ‘

 

‘I just want my friend…’

 

It takes him a bit to realize he’s actually said that. Morgana just sucks on her cigarette and looks at him through the smoke.

 

‘Well’, she says at last, ‘that’s a bloody rotten way to go about making friends, mate’.

 

In a very admirable feat of self-control, if he does say so himself, Merlin manages to  _not_  smash his face against the wall.

 

 

–

 

 

  
‘This is not what Albion was supposed to be’, he told everyone who would listen. Who was actually no one, since he’d managed to become that old, bitter hermit he’d aspired to a few centuries before.

 

Children were encouraged to run away from him. After they’d shouted how he’d burn in hell and thrown something at him, of course.

 

There was a young woman who’d come to him, though. She had brown eyes and golden hair and Merlin was convinced she was also Percival. He was later disabused of this idea, but while it lasted he knew a measure of happiness.

 

She’d needed poultices for her ailing mother and her younger brothers, she’d wanted a place by the fire to clean herself up after a crusader had had his way with her, she’d asked for help when her mother died and her baby was born.

 

He’d almost married her, but she was too young for him and prayed to her god on her knees. In the end, she became ill and died on a hot summer day, still too young. Merlin was selfishly glad he hadn’t married her, but he still wept long into the night for her.

 

After he left that village, Merlin locked himself up in a cave, never to be seen by any living thing again. Ever.

 

This was the first time he visited Avalon.

 

After attempt number five at death through starvation failed, he’d just given up on himself and gone to sleep. Only to wake up in a place he could never properly describe while not there, shifting forms, glimmering sights, tingling voices and Arthur’s hearty laughter were the only things he could put words to, everything else was just a hazy and warm weight on the very center of his chest.

 

When the Renaissance finally managed to wake him up, his anger boiled an entire lake and burned all surrounding greenery to cinders. He’d been  _home_. Until some idiot in ridiculous trousers and stupid sleeves shook him out of it.

 

That idiot, of course, was Gwaine. But Merlin didn’t figure  _that_ one out until said idiot died of old age and too much wine. And according to Merlin’s expert opinion, of heartbreak. It wasn’t until he’d put two and two together and came up with the five that was Gwaine, that Merlin realized what had happened.

 

Ever since, the whole travesty about Lancelot and Guinevere and betrayals and carts burned like acid on Merlin’s soul whenever it popped up in his periphery.

 

But he’d understood the message (of Gwaine’s daeath, that is. Whatever message there was in that  _thing_ , Merlin wanted no part of. Though he could also understand Gwaine’s fascination with it). And thus, his goal, his life purpose was set, he’d find his wayward friends again. Whenever they came back to him, he’d find them.

 

As soon as he was done mourning. Again.

 

  
–

 

  
  
So, Morgana still doesn’t trust him, but by the time the second light-bulb exploded, she was believing him. And not calling the cops or punching him bloody -which was a definite possibility for a moment there- so he’s carefully congratulating himself.

 

Or maybe the frozen peas packet she gave him to press into his swollen eye is numbing his brains, too. He can’t be sure.

 

‘And you’ve done this your whole life?’ Morgana asks from her chair across the table and between puffs of her third cigarette.

 

‘Get punched in the face or make things fly?’

 

She smiles at that. Merlin represses the surge of hope.

 

‘Neither. Though maybe both, later. I meant break out strange news to unsuspecting people’. Then, suddenly, she seems to get suspicious again. Merlin sighs, convinced that ‘later’ she mentioned so off-handedly was about to be taken away from him.

 

He says nothing, just waits.

 

And then it comes, after she’s extinguished her half-smoked ciggy.

 

‘How did you know about me? About my- ‘, a cough, ‘well, you know’.

 

‘I didn’t. That is, I read your flier on some crystals shop, and just  _knew_ ’, he wipes a trail of cold water from his cheek under her narrowed gaze. ‘It just happens. I see someone across the street, or hear their voice, or read something about them and just know’.

 

Still she’s quiet. He shrugs.

 

‘How many people like this have you found?’

 

‘Not as many as I’d like’.

 

‘What do you mean?’

 

‘Not many’.

 

Her look could probably have thinned the paint on the wall behind him, had it not been focused on his immortal self.

 

‘Some of them are duds. Or I’m mistaken about them, somehow. It’s happened, too’.

 

‘Whatever’. The way she flips her hair off her shoulder reminds him of her last incarnation and that old wound on his heart throbs.

 

‘Want some coffee?’, he offers.

 

‘If I did, I’d be drinking it right now’.

 

Silence.

 

‘So what happens next?’

 

‘What do you want to happen?’

 

‘I want to know how to predict the lottery numbers. And I want my mother back. And I want to turn back time so that you never saw that flier’.

 

‘If you could do, or have, any of those things, you would be doing them or having them right now’.

 

For a second he thinks she might cry, but then she huffs and he remembers this is  _Morgana_.

 

  
–

 

  
  
The first time he ran into Gwen, he knew, for an undeniable and heart-wrenching fact, that he’d run into Gwen. Gwen.

 

It was Gwen.

 

Without thinking he withheld her purse as she tried to tug it from him. Eyes focused on hers, on her growing distress. When she said ‘Please, please let go’, he finally snapped out of it and took a giant step back.

 

He’d scared her and himself, he was preparing to scare her further by chasing after her if she ran away. In that millisecond between one movement and the next he was already imagining the rest of his (her) life in the shadows of the trees by which she walked, hiding from her but unable to let go of her, unable to approach her again after having cocked it up so royally on  _their first encounter in ages_. Literally ages.

 

Then the world tilted oddly, air rushed by his ears, his throat formed a terribly undignified and most definitely unauthorized yelp, and his bottom hit the hard cobbles of the sidewalk.

 

If he’d held any doubts about her -which he didn’t, but if he had- the way the woman’s hand reached out to him as he fell, and the worried look on her face would have confirmed his hunch.

 

‘Gwen’.

 

He didn’t realize he’d said it aloud until she was fixing her skirts to kneel next to him and check his eyes.

 

‘Can you tell me what day it is?’, she asks briskly.

 

‘Er. Saturday’

 

‘Good, good’, she replied a little distractedly as she helped him to his feet.

 

He was entirely too busy reminding himself to let go of her hand and not clutch her to his chest, because that would be inappropriate to levels he refused to consider, to catch her next question.

 

‘Sorry?’

 

She was definitely wary of him now. Again, that is. But she repeated herself anyway.

 

‘Do you remember where you were going? Or where you were coming from?’

 

Of course he remembered where he’d been and where he was supposed to be going to, and of course she knew, too. At least where he’d been.

 

‘I’m not drunk’.

 

‘I’m not saying you are’.

 

‘You implied it’.

 

‘You zigzagged into my way, made me drop my things and then landed on your bum. And you reek.’

 

‘I’m not drunk’.

 

She sighs.

 

‘Listen, I need to be at work. You need to get home and sleep it off. Now please let go of my hand, or I shall scream’.

 

After noticing he was, indeed, still holding her hand in his, Merlin felt his cheeks grow hot and did as requested.

 

He then did  _not_  stalk her. He just followed her at a prudent distance (so as not to give her the wrong idea) to make sure no  _actual_  drunkard happened upon her. Besides, there was a war going on, who knew when a bomb would drop out of the sky, or something. Also, he was still on his way home, just through a different route, that just so happened to lead him past the hospital she apparently worked at.

 

He married her, naturally. The first chance he got he proposed and she accepted. Three months later, but she accepted and so Merlin married the woman he’d loved twice and lost once.

 

When their daughter was born, a spike of guilt (another one) lodged itself in his heart, that he’d get to have a child when Arthur couldn’t, that he’d get to be the father of Gwen’s children when Arthur couldn’t.

 

That he’d been so very careful not to say or do anything that might jostle Gwen’s memories of a lifetime when she ruled a country and loved two men and bore no children at all. He was still convinced that two sets of memories had killed Gwaine, he would not allow the same thing to happen twice.

 

Their second child was a boy and Merlin was not there for the birth, he’d been fixing airplanes on a secret air base two towns over. When he returned, he met baby Arthur’s sleeping face and something curdled in his gut, even as he stroked the dark tuft of hair on his son’s head.

 

When Maddie turned seven, they all went out for dinner and Merlin told her the story of a brave knight who used to fight with two swords and his friend who was the most noble of men. That night Gwen murmured Elyan’s name in her sleep and Merlin’s entire body went cold. It was happening again.

 

So he told her. He performed the enchantment he’d been preparing since Gwaine’s second death and showed her. She cried and would not talk to him for weeks. Arthur and Maddie were scared. Merlin got drunk.

 

Gwen found him one day sitting outside their doorstep, almost frozen over, with drool caked to the corners of his mouth, eyes wide and glassy.

 

‘What’s happened to you?’

 

‘I’m sorry’.

 

‘Come inside, you’ll freeze out here’.

 

‘I’m sorry’.

 

Later, when he could bear to look at himself in the mirror again, he went to her, took her hands in his and kissed each of her knuckles, her fingernails, the thin skin on the backs of her hands, the fleshy pads on her palms. Which each kiss he sent tendrils of warmth into her skin, he asked forgiveness for the unforgivable. He gave her everything he was.

 

She kissed him, took his hand and lead him to their bed.

 

He’d made love to her many, many times before, in this house and on a stone castle long ago. But this time, after she took him back, after she’d told him she forgave him, she loved him, how grateful she was they’d found each other again, is the one he remembered most.

 

The woman looking at him as she sank down on him, as she whispered her love, as he touched her and pleased her, as he climaxed deep within her, was  _Gwen_. Her eyes were different, and her hair and her skin, but this was her again, after so long.

 

They cried in each other’s arms, afterward, and reminisced about times long gone, friends lost and gained. About how (king) Arthur was still not there.

 

Gwen died on another winter. Maddie’s children tried to convince him to come live with them, but both Maddie and (baby) Arthur knew he wouldn’t, knew why and knew this was goodbye to both their parents.

 

Not-so-deep-down Merlin thought (little) Arthur would never forgive him for leaving them.  
  


 

–

 

  
After she’s done being sick, Morgana weeps. Bitter, fat, never-ending tears that Merlin feels embedding themselves into his heart, burning into the skin on which they land. She lets him hold her and he does. It’s all he can do.

 

‘How could- ‘

 

There’s something she’s been meaning to say for a while now, lots of somethings most likely, but she can’t seem to find the words for them, all her attempts ending in sobs or hiccups or loaded silences, so he holds her and rocks her gently and lets her empty herself on him, lets her punch him and curse him and cradle his face between her hands.

 

It’s a draining spell to both the caster and the castee (?, he hasn’t worked out this taxonomy, yet). And in this particular case, the memories are especially burdensome. So he lets her, because that’s all he can do.

 

  
—

 

  
Arthur was, once again, just a flash in his life. A burning bundle of memories leading up to a blaze of glory of an extinction.

 

He’d been a racer, Merlin had worked on his car once, had met the man, spoken to him and had the utterest certainty that this was Arthur and that this time, Merlin would have no chance whatsoever to hang onto him. So he let go. Watched from afar, through the telly and on newspapers, followed his career and what little of his life could be gleaned.

 

Followed his last days as he died of injuries from a crash.

 

Afterward, while chatting with his apprentice at the shop, Merlin had felt that familiar churning in his gut when the kid spoke about ‘him, Mike, I wanna be like him’.

 

  
–

 

  
As much as he tries, Merlin can’t replay the sequence of events that lead them here, but he blames Morgana’s fist against his face, his recoil and the subsequent intimate way in which his face became acquainted with the ceramic floor of her bathroom.

 

By the time he came to, she had rolled him onto his back, was wiping the blood off his nose and gently calling his name.

 

His real name.

 

Once the world had sharp edges again, she helped him up, something something something. Probably something more. And now he’s bundled up next to her in her bed, her hand tracing vaguely ticklish patterns on the back of his, her head on his shoulder and her breath against his neck.

 

‘I did love you, you know’, she whispers.

 

He knows.

 

‘Not the first time. I think I could have, then, but… well’.

 

He knows this too.

 

‘I loved you, too’, he says.  _Both times_ , he doesn’t say.

 

‘I know’, she says.  _Both times_ , her kiss says.

 

  
–

 

  
Because the universe apparently believes in innovation -or at least in constantly catching Merlin unawares- it’s Morgana who found him.

 

Sitting on a coffee shop, next to a potted plant and in view of the zebra crossing. Minding his own business and absolutely not expecting the smack on the back of the head that makes tea come spraying out of his mouth.

 

‘You owed me that’, she said by way of greeting, before plopping herself down in front of him and stealing his cup. It was empty, so the joke would have been on her, except he just raised his hand and waved the waiter over to order a fresh pot and an extra cup.

 

Apparently she’d been born with magic again, vastly more diluted than before, of course, but with enough spark to light the particular candle that illuminated certain facts of her past. Her metaphor, not his.

 

Her name was Tara and she grew up on the countryside, riding horses and making windows open and close from afar. There used to be nightmares, until a psychic (her word, not his) told her that they weren’t nightmares at all, they were memories and did she know she’d been a witch in a past life?

 

Morgana (Tara) hadn’t, of course. But it was one of those moments where things click and it all just  _makes sense,_ you know?(her emphasis, not his. Though he did know).

 

‘So, what’s up with you?’ she asks, when she finally pauses for breath and a sip of tea.

 

Merlin wanted to ask her if she was going to kill him or what, but this was the seventies, peace and love and all that, right?

 

‘Well, you know, been not-dying and running into you people here and there’.

 

‘What?’, she sat up suddenly, put her teacup down and the eagerness in her eyes told him he better not disappoint her, or else.

 

‘What, what?’, she’d made him spit his tea out, he was in no mood to try and avoid any or elses.

 

‘Look, we can be enemies again, or you can play nice’.

 

‘Really? That’s the best you can come up with?’

 

‘I did die, you know. Unlike you, apparently. So, I figure you owe me this’.

 

‘I thought that was what the slap was for’.

 

‘You thought wrong, as usual. That was for the poisoning’.

 

‘Will you ever let go of that?’.

 

‘Not in a million years, arsehole. Or lives’, as she pulled her hair up into a ponytail, Merlin thought she looked like a warrior readying for battle, and it hit him that at no point had he doubted who she was.

 

It hadn’t been the bucket of water that finding Gwen had been, or the unexpected joy of meeting Arthur, nor the confused emotions of befriending Gwaine again. It was something more along the lines of what one feels when the toast lands on the side of the marmalade, combined with the breath one expels when the train arrives on time after fearing a delay.

 

Inside his head, Merlin had whispered something like ‘of course’.

 

Years later,  _you pooooisonnned_  me was her favorite argument-winning strategy. He didn’t marry her because she’d said no even before he’d finished getting the question out. But they did live together until she decided to move across the pond and left him stranded in a mess of shared belongings and half-fought feuds from long ago lives.

 

She’d had a dream about Mordred living in Arizona, and she just had to go find him. Merlin had complained about all the possible things that could happen to them (her) in that mythical land of savages he’d heard about and refused to go anywhere near an airport. Also he kind of had to stay in Albion lest it all goes to shit without his wise, guiding hand.

 

Morgana had snorted at that, as she was wont to do. But then her eyes had gone dim as they did whenever anything in their conversation hinted at things even remotely related to Gwen. Over the years, Merlin had come to understand in her silences, all the words she wished she’d said to Gwen, and all the ones she wished she hadn’t.

 

He used to think she’d rejected his proposal because Gwen had had him first. But in time it became clear to him that it wasn’t Gwen she was jealous of.

 

‘I’m sorry’, he’d said, reaching for her, then dropping his hand when she dodged.

 

‘It’s okay. I’m still going. Nobody unwisely entrusted me with the well-being of an imaginary nation’.

 

He resisted the urge to pick a fight. This was their goodbye and he would not let her mar it with bickering. Instead he helped her fold her trousers, collect her toiletries and pick which pictures to take with her.

 

When he saw her off to the plane, Morgana gave him a pendant, a little thing she’d made for him. A tiny bottle with a few drops of her perfume and a tiny tiny little roll of paper, with it came an envelope which she claimed contained a life-sized version of the message in the bottle.

 

He kissed her and held her and made her swear she’d write to him. Then he held her again. They stood like that, a little island in the middle of a sea of people until it was time for her to go.

 

The note said  _See you in the next life,warlock_  in pointy letters she’d written with his favorite blue biro.

 

He kept both on a wooden box he’d meant to give her for her next birthday.

 

  
–

 

  
‘His name was Beatrice. Did I tell you that?’, her voice sounds sleepy. She must be exhausted and he should probably let her get some sleep. Hopefully he won’t have to leave for it.

 

‘Yes, you wrote about it. And MordredBeatrice was Black and had a husband and a new-born girl. And she opened her door and recognized you, invited you in for coffee and taught you the songs of her church. She could heal small ailments, too. That was her magic’.

 

‘Oh’.

 

‘She died shortly after you, did you know? Her daughter wrote to tell me. I still have that letter, if you want it’.

 

She shifts and kisses him again. Says nothing.

 

When he wakes up he realizes he fell asleep. And that Morgana’s not in bed with him anymore. It smells like coffee and toast. The clock says it’s two in the afternoon.

 

His eye is swollen shut, his head hurts and there are bruises on his chest where Morgana hit him last night. His stomach rumbles.

 

Merlin files this moment, this precise instant, alongside the happy memories he’s hoarded along his long, long life.

 

When he comes out to the kitchen, she’s braiding her hair facing the window. Her clothes are clean and there’s a tattoo on the back of her neck he missed yesterday. She smiles at him through their faint reflection on the windowpane, a little sad, a little relieved.

 

He smiles back.

 

‘Here’, she says, offering him a steaming cup of coffee. It’s bitter and burns his throat and stomach. He gulps it down.

 

‘I, uh. I did something. Well, not  _did_. Just. There’s. I have a surprise for you’.

 

And so he goes, wearing the same clothes he wore yesterday, smelling vaguely like sick and burnt coffee, with a bruised face and a limp he can’t remember acquiring.

 

When she opens the door, the bell bounces back and nearly hits him on the face. He ducks, slips and has to support himself on a chair to avoid further embarrassment.

 

‘Oh my God!’, says a voice from his left.

 

Before he turns, before he has time to think that  _of course_  this is how they meet again, he knows.

 

The same certainty, the same stone in his throat.

 

‘Gwen’.

 

The bloody same blurted out name.

 

Except this time there are tears in her eyes, and she’s smiling and holding his hands, and Morgana’s got an arm wrapped around her shoulders and is crying, too.

 

Except this time Gwen knows him, too.

 

‘Merlin’, she says, again and again.

 

The three of them become a tangle of limbs and a mess of tears and snot and laughter. Until the door opens again, the man coming in dodges the bell, shakes his head at it, and finally focuses on them.

 

Merlin’s breath catches.

 

‘So, you’ve finally decided to join us, then. Cheers’.

 

In every single incarnation, Arthur Pendragon (or Jason West, this time round) is always blond and a prat, it seems.

 

They’re in Arthur and Gwen’s home, he’s gathered, there are pictures of a wedding and some vacations and a little boy with a stuffed pony. There’s a pair of knitting needles with what looks to be a yellow bootie half-way done.

 

He’s also gathered (by Arthur’s unsubtle jokes) that the two of them have had their memories from previous lives for a while now. He wants to ask when, how, why didn’t they look for him? But Arthur and Morgana are talking quietly by the table, Merlin’s helping Gwen serve lunch, and he can wait.

 

He’s got a lifetime ahead of him, he can wait.

 

 


End file.
